Set yourself aside. You will not perish. You will discover the promise. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Who is the main human character in Torah? An excellent case can be made for Moses. The Torah, after all, is also known as the Five Books of Moses. He appears to be the primary protagonist in the narrative, the one at the center of action. The story, from Exodus on, traces his development from birth to death. He evolves from a prince of Egypt to a poor shepherd to a divinely commissioned messenger to Pharaoh to the leader of a people in their forty-year march from slavery to freedom. Pretty compelling.
I would like to suggest another character for the role of Torah’s protagonist: the community of Israel. It is their crying out that provokes God to remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This triggers the grand drama that is God’s confrontation with Pharaoh, the exodus and the journey to the land of promise. It is their yearnings, anxieties, character flaws, and aspirations that drive the action. It is their fate which matters most. And it is the community of Israel that is focus of all the sacred sequels, all the way through the very last verses in II Chronicles.
This elevation of an en masse community over that of an identifiable single human being may challenge our sense of where to focus our attention in a work of art. We can create an image in our minds of what Moses looked liked. It is harder to do that for a collective of hundreds of thousands. And one that in an ongoing sacred narrative extends over millennia.
Yet the deprivileging of a distinct individual as primary character and the shifting of the narrative’s emotional heart to a more diffuse focus is one of Deuteronomy’s concluding lessons for us. And a hint of how important that is for moving from slavery to freedom appears in this week’s portion, Vaetchanan.
The portion opens with Moses’ complaint, “I pleaded with God” to be able to cross over into the promised land. And in recounting the moment at Mount Sinai, he says: “I stood between God and you…” The early Hasidic master Menachem Mendl of Kotz teachingly reads the verse as “I stands between you and God.” The 20th century kabbalist Mordecai HaKohen elaborated on Menachem Mendl’s teaching: “Your ego stands between you and God. Normally not even an iron barrier can separate Israel from God, but self-love, egotism will drive them apart.”
The Jewish Bible gives literary form to the tension between individual and…something beyond self. Western philosophy and religion views the individual as profoundly separate from others and prioritizes the individual’s independence and value over the group. Eastern philosophy denies the existence of a fixed human self, and instead views the “self” as an illusion.
Buddhism, which developed beginning in about the 5th century B.C.E., teaches that the idea of “me” is a fiction. That the concept of self is an invention of the thinking mind. A central Buddhist notion is that of anatta (“no self”). Rather than a fixed and permanent essence, we are a compound of ever-changing, impermanent elements. A belief in “self” is a source of suffering.
Similarly, Taoism promotes the concept of wu wei(“non-doing”/“actionless action”). Terence James Stannus Gray was a mid-20th century English theater producer who later in his life studied Taoism. Under the pseudonym Wei Wu Wei (“action that is non-action”) he wrote a series of books and articles on Taoism. In explaining the vain attempt to find happiness as an individual, he wrote: “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”
Robert Rauschenberg in his twenties was an art student at Black Mountain College, where he studied with Josef Albers. At the age of twenty-six he painted a series of stretched canvasses in a plain, solid white. Each piece consists of a different number panels. There are one, two, three, four, and seven panel versions. The units within each painting are uniform in size, modular and proportionally balanced. Pictured here is White Painting, the seven-panel iteration.
The canvass presents an essential flatness. It is pristine, with minimal brush or roller marks. Absent are any painterly gestures. The artist’s subjective hand has disappeared. To further relinquish the assertion of his individual self as creator, Rauschenberg enlisted friends to repaint the series’ surfaces in 1952-53. This upended the notion of what constitutes an “original” painting. And in preparation for an exhibition of the series at the Castelli Gallery in 1968, he stepped back entirely and ceded their refabrication to his studio assistant Brice Marden.
Immediately upon concluding his White Paintings, Rauschenberg wrote about them to gallery owner Betty Parsons: “They are large white (1 white as 1 God) canvasses organized and selected with experiences of time and presented with the suspense, excitement, and body of an organic silence…the plastic fullness of nothing…It is completely irrelevant that I am making them – Today is their creator.”
In the summer of 1952 composer John Cage organized a collaborative theater event in the dining hall at Black Mountain College. He hung one or more of the White Paintings as set décor for the event.
About the paintings, Cage wrote: “To Whom/No subject/No image/No taste/No object/No beauty/No message/No talent/No technique (no why?)/No idea/No intention/No art/No object/No feeling/No black/No white (no and)/After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that could not be changed…/Hallelujah! The blind can see again; the water’s fine.”
That same summer at Black Mountain College, Cage, inspired by Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, created 4’33”. It is a three-movement composition that does not contain a single note of music. Instead, Cage wrote detailed instructions for a single musician to enter the stage, prepare an instrument and then sit in absolute silence for the full duration of the piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The performer’s silence allowed the sounds of the surroundings and audience members to become the music itself. Nothing was performed, and much was heard.
Emerging out of the Hasidic wisdom about the fruitfulness of overcoming one’s ego is the teaching: It is a great achievement to make something out of Nothing; even greater is to make Nothing out of something.
Set yourself aside. You will not perish. You will discover the promise.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) on Thursday, August 15 as we explore Nothing from something.
